Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Stephen Cone | Henry Gamble's Birthday Party

After
reading Akiva Gottlieb’s discussion of the writer-director Stephen Cone in the Los Angeles Times this morning, I
decided to view Henry Gamble’s Birthday
Party this morning, which had been recommended to me by the totally unreliable
algorithms of Netflix (who often suggest for me a series of films I would never
possibly watch). Well, I have watched numerous gay films, of course, and they
recognized that I might be interested in this one, although I had previously
shunned it because I had perhaps seen far too many young-boys-coming-out films
and just felt I had to move on. My true love, obviously, is of classic
international films.

What a remarkable surprise, however, was
Cone’s 2015 film, which revealed to me a new talent that I might never have
imagined. For Cone’s film is not really about a gay boy coming to terms with
his sexuality (although it is that too), but an entire community of highly committed
Evangelical Baptists having to come to terms with their own personal demons in
relationship with their often fervent beliefs which deny their all-too human desires
and behaviors.

Unlike
so many directors attempting to deal with the same issues, Cone (the son of
just such a Baptist preacher) never once dismisses or diminishes their values,
but merely helps us to try to understand their own deep suffering because, as
they might put it, sinners are still to be loved because Jesus forgives,
despite their sins. Of course, their views of themselves and others as deep
sinners is often horribly judgmental and painful, and in the case of Henry (beautifully
played by Cole Doman), and his mother, Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) in complete
doubt of her relationship with her husband, Bob (Pat Healy)--who has somewhat
recently taken over the pastoral position of a cancer victim, generally
referred to as HM (whose wife, Rose Matthews is also a guest at Henry’s
birthday party)--these religious values have put them into deep turmoil. In fact,
nearly the whole religious community, young and old, have been invited to Henry’s 17th
birthday party, which sets up a large ensemble cast that works very much like
those of Robert Altman’s films and even one of Cone’s cinematic mentors, Jean
Renoir, particularly in his Rules of the
Game. If here the sexual romps are basically hidden, the pool being a
perfect place to play sexual games beneath the water, it still represents a series of
sexual adventures which result in a great many problems.

As the young visitors to the party strip
off their outer clothing to go swimming in the Gamble’s pool, the elders hover
over their youth’s frolics to discuss moral issues—particularly Bonnie Montgomery,
the only truly moral gorgon of the group—and, basically to gossip, as do the
young kids themselves. Some who dare attend the affable Henry’s party are
clearly secular and separated from their religious peers, particularly a lesbian
couple, while others, such as the only black of the group, Logan (Daniel Kyri)
and the former pastor’s son Ricky, are visually, if not vocally, ostracized.
Both, so the youngsters and their elders gossip are gay.

The Gamble’s daughter, Autumn (Nina Ganet)
now attending a Christian-based college, is equally an outsider. Evidently, having had sex with a young neighboring student, Aaron (Tyler Ross),
who also tags along later to the party, she feels, mostly based on her
religious principles, he has taken away her “purity.” She is also uncomfortable with her own body.

Rose has brought a few bottles of
wine to the party, which are quickly secreted under a back sink, but, one by one,
the elders sneak out to imbibe in what they describe and medicine, and the elder community spirits shift, as
they begin revealing their sins and, most importantly their fears and
questions.

By the time the party has nearly come to
a close, Kat, the pillar of the Gamble family, has admitted to her daughter
that she has not been fulfilled by her marriage to her pastor husband and that
she has had a brief affair with the former Baptist minister as he
was dying from cancer. The secular girls brilliantly question the would-be
biologist Autumn about how she balances the fundamentalist teachings of her religious
academy with the truth of Darwinian and other scientific teaching. Some of the
randy young boys find love with the quite willing girls, and, Ricky, locked
accidentally in the bathroom, razors his face because of his personal suffering
as being a young gay man in such a deeply religious community, now rejected as a chaperone
for the annual community summer camp. He has been caught with an erection while
showering with some of his young charges.

Given Cone’s totally humanitarian
acceptance of all his character’s flaws, all is apparently forgiven. Even the
nasty Bonnie’s totally restricted daughter, Grace (Darci Nalepa), having been refused the possibility of the pleasure of the pool, causally dips her toes
into it, denying her mother’s restrictions. And, in the marvelous surprise of
the movie, the birthday boy, Henry, invites the gay black boy Logan to spend
the night, asking, as film’s end, if he might kiss him.

Cone does not show us that act, even
though the movie has begun with Henry and his obviously straight friend, Gabe,
in a mutual masturbation scene. We don’t need to see what is clearly the consummation of Henry’s and Logan’s love for one another; we can remember it from youth, the
time of all of our discoveries for love and spiritual meaning.

This film is one of the most non-judgmental
and loving films I have seen in a very long time. These possibly Trump-supporters
are made human, filled with the flaws of all human beings, and presented to us a real beings in a time when most of us, deem everyone who don’t agree with us to simply
be “others” or as Clinton herself misspoke as “deplorables.” These characters remind me,
vaguely, of one of my two minister uncles, a rather pious Methodist who had five
sons, three of whom turned out to be gay, one tragically dying of AIDS. Their mother, at a rather early age, developed Alzheimers at time when few of us had even heard of the disease. The
heart, as one critic observed, demands its own terms. The spiritual may help
some to live, but love, as Christ reminded us, is the most important thing of
all. As one of the characters in this film even reminds his pastor “Christ also
drank wine.”

This movie is a small one, despite its
extensive cast, but it shouldn’t be dismissed. The New York Times critic, Ben Kenigsberg’s argued that “Mr.
Cone is not a sophisticated writer, and his dialogue frequently spells out what
ought to be subtext.” I strongly disagree. This is one of the most carefully
nuanced and subtle series of conversations of contemporary films. Even apparent
character types, such as the insistent Christian critic of all things current,
Bonnie, is made multi-dimensional in Cone’s film. People, as her somewhat drunken husband
insists, have so many stories to reveal.